Bickering Gets Old in 'Imaginary Friends'

Published 7:00 pm, Wednesday, December 11, 2002

Perpetual bickering can be exhausting _ even when the combatants are portrayed by such dazzling performers as Swoosie Kurtz and Cherry Jones.

In "Imaginary Friends," Nora Ephron's odd new play with music, the sniping is pretty catty, often amusing and peppered with enough famous literary folk to fill several bookshelves.

But then the verbal fisticuffs are between Lillian Hellman (Kurtz) and Mary McCarthy (Jones), two formidable writers who never seemed to be at a loss for words, particularly when they were discussing each other.

In "Imaginary Friends," Ephron _ the screenwriter for "Silkwood" and "When Harry Met Sally …" _ takes a real-life incident and then adds some fanciful speculation that is only intermittently entertaining.

The facts: During an appearance on Dick Cavett's television talk show more than 20 years ago, McCarthy, author of "The Group," called Hellman "a dishonest writer," adding that "Every word she writes is a lie, including `and' and `the.'"

Hellman, who wrote such hit plays as "The Little Foxes" and "The Children's Hour" as well as the memoir "Pentimento," sued McCarthy. And their feud was off and running.

The fiction: The evening begins in some nebulous show-biz afterlife _ not hell, but certainly not heaven either _ where the two women meet after they are dead.

"We never liked each other," says Hellman, and McCarthy readily agrees. Then these ladies each tells their side of the story, assisted by two personable performers, Harry Groener and Anne Pitoniak, as well as a singing and dancing chorus.

"Imaginary Friends" is a theatrical hybrid, not quite a play and not quite a musical. It settles for an uncertain in-between, although you might not be bothered too much by the disparity, thanks to Jack O'Brien's seamless direction.

This veteran director, who has supervised such decidedly different Broadway projects as "Hairspray" and Tom Stoppard's "The Invention of Love," knows how to keep a show from flagging. And he has been assisted by the inventive choreographer Jerry Mitchell, who did the dances for "Hairspray."

When the repartee between the two ladies sags _ and it often becomes repetitious _ they bring on one of the half-dozen or so songs by Marvin Hamlisch (music) and Craig Carnelia (lyrics). The score is spiffy enough, particularly Carnelia's intelligent, often witty lyrics. And though Kurtz and Jones are not musical-comedy performers, they make a game attempt to sing and dance.

Kurtz, in particular, is an inspired comedian. A glance. A pause. A raised eyebrow or two. The woman knows how to get a laugh.

Hellman tells her own life's story, beginning with her privileged New Orleans childhood to her love affair with author Dashiell Hammett to her infatuation with the Soviet Union and finally to her stand before a red-baiting congressional committee at which she proclaimed, "I cannot and will not cut my conscience to fit this year's fashions."

McCarthy gets equal time. But Jones has a harder time of it because McCarthy's life is not as smoothly told _ her tragic childhood (both parents died in the 1918-19 Spanish flu epidemic) and then her own literary liaisons with Philip Rahv, editor of the Partisan Review, and Edmund Wilson. Yet Jones has a sturdy confidence and a disarming smile that get her through the roughest patches.

Besides Wilson, Hammett and Rahv, names of other big-gun literary types are dropped with deadening frequency: Stephen Spender, John Dos Passos, Ernest Hemingway, Norman Mailer, among others. Most show up in person, played by the genial Groener, who portrays all the men in the show.

"Imaginary Friends" is kind of a literary vaudeville, a debate between the two women over what mattered most: the truth or the story. There's even a jaunty two-man dance number that celebrates both camps. In the end, though, it's Kurtz and Jones who triumph rather than the unresolved arguments over fact or fiction.